


Reality

by skarlatha



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Character Death, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Post Reichenbach, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-22
Updated: 2012-05-22
Packaged: 2017-11-05 19:59:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/410426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skarlatha/pseuds/skarlatha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Sherlock's fall, John sits against the bathroom wall of 221B. He's not sure how he got there or what will happen next.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reality

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for "The Reichenbach Fall." Technically, this takes place between the scene at the hospital and John's meeting with his therapist. Most of the options still get him there. 
> 
> In case you're curious, the story John thinks about in this fic is "Bullet in the Brain" by Tobias Wolff. It's pretty good. If you haven't read it, you should.

Sherlock lets himself fall from the roof, and John doesn’t know what to do. He has options. There are many things that could have happened. And he sits on the floor in the bathroom of 221B Baker Street and wonders what he’s done, what he has left to do, what path his life took from the time when his heart broke apart on the pavement outside the hospital. Sometimes it’s clear. Sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it seems like all the options happened, his life splintering out into alternate realities so that everything that could possibly happen did happen. Sometimes it seems like there was only one ending, and that ending was the only one that could have happened.

And he sits on the floor and he tries to remember how he got there. 

 

1.  
John pushes his way through the crowd gathered around Sherlock’s body, lying limp on the concrete, and he tries to fight them all off so that he can gather the consulting detective up into his arms, but they hold him back and he’s too stunned to break free. He may be crying; he may be stony-faced and professional. He’s not sure. He hears himself saying “he’s my friend” over and over, and he wonders if it sounds as muffled to everyone else as it does in his own head. His heart breaks in two, flattened on the pavement, scorched by the heat of the burn, and it’s somehow both numb and throbbing with pain at the same time, but later, as he’s sitting on the bathroom floor, he doesn’t remember that. 

What he remembers is that when he looks down into Sherlock’s half-closed lifeless eyes, they’re the wrong color. Not noticeably so. The average observer wouldn’t have known the difference, but John hasn’t been an average observer in months. And the hair, Sherlock’s glorious curls made even darker by the blood, have the faintest line of a lighter brown at the roots. 

He flicks his eyes down the body, trying not to give away the deductions in his eyes. The coat is the same, but not quite. There’s a small bit of loose thread on the collar that’s darker than the other thread on the coat--clearly an attempt at a repair that Sherlock would not have bothered with. The metallic scent of all the blood almost masks the faint fragrance of a cologne that Sherlock doesn’t use. He doesn’t tell them any of this. He lets them think Sherlock is the one on the ground in front of them, because if Sherlock has gone to all this trouble to fake it, he wouldn’t dare ruin that for him.

And so when they take the stranger away, put him in the morgue and promise John that they’ll be making the autopsy results public soon, he just nods absently and walks away. He stops by the store, picks up some milk and a package of the biscuits he knows Sherlock likes best, shouts some abuse at the chip and pin machine until it miraculously takes his card, and goes home. 

He puts the milk away and walks into the bathroom. He runs cold water into the sink and splashes his face with it, then dries it off and sits down heavily against the bathroom wall. Someone died today, horribly, right in front of him, and even though he knows in his heart that it wasn’t Sherlock, he wonders if he’ll ever sleep again without seeing the fall in his nightmares.

He pulls his phone out of his pocket and waits for Sherlock to call. 

 

2.  
The same as the first, except the eyes he sees are familiar: extinguished versions of blue-gray flames. The coat is immaculate. There’s no cologne wafting through the air, only the distinctive scent that he’s come to recognize as Sherlock’s, and the roots of his hair are dark and beautiful like the rest of him.

And so they take John’s heart away and promise that the autopsy results will be made public, and he walks away, numb and dazed, and he goes to the store and picks up the milk but doesn’t make it past the biscuit aisle. He puts his hand up to grab the package that contains Sherlock’s favorite biscuits and then can’t stop the sob that escapes from his throat or the buckle in his knees that takes him to the floor. 

Mycroft finds him there. He should have known Mycroft would know where he was. Mycroft strides over to him and reaches down to try and help John off the floor, but John yanks his arm away and scrambles a few feet away, glaring at Mycroft and tensing his whole body like a wounded jaguar. 

“John,” Mycroft starts, straightening back up and tilting his head slightly at him as if he’s scolding a petulant child. It’s a look he gives Sherlock all the time and John hates him for it.

“Leave me,” he chokes out. “You did this. This is your fault.”

Mycroft sighs. “At least let me help you home.”

John hesitates for a long time, then nods slowly. Mycroft helps him to his feet and guides him out of the store and upstairs to the flat. John refuses to speak to him. Mycroft spends time settling John in and reassuring himself that the doctor isn’t going to do anything rash, then leaves him alone.

John locks himself in the bathroom after Mycroft leaves and leans against the wall, his throat working quickly to hold back the tears. When that doesn’t work, he slides down the wall to sit on the floor and breaks down. 

 

3.  
The same as the second, only Mycroft doesn’t leave. John wants to hate him. He wants to kill him. He draws a gun on him and yells hysterically until Mycroft walks forward, completely dismissing any possibility that John would actually fire, and gathers John up in his arms. The anger and grief and shock in John’s body melts away, replaced by a bewildering, desperate need to remind himself that he’s alive, to have one more chance to show Sherlock how he feels, and suddenly it’s not Mycroft’s arms that are around him, they’re Sherlock’s, and in that moment, everything feels okay. 

That night, John learns what it feels like to kiss a man, to kiss Mr. Holmes, to make love to Mr. Holmes, only it’s the wrong Mr. Holmes and later, when they’re lying in John’s bed, bodies side-by-side and tense because neither of them wants to move when moving means this really happened, John stares at the ceiling and learns what it feels like to hate every single cell in his own body individually. 

“It’s because we both miss him,” Mycroft murmurs. “It was a comfort. To help each other accept what’s happened.”

“Shut up,” John says. “You don’t miss him. This was your fault. All of it. This, th-the f-fall...” He swallows hard and closes his eyes. “All of it. It’s your fault.”

And Mycroft understands it for what it is and so he gets out of bed, dresses, and leaves the flat without further attempts at conversation. John waits until he’s gone and gets up, strips the bedclothes off the bed, and reaches for the clothes he left on the floor. He picks up the jumper and looks dully at it. He’s always liked this one, thought it made him look younger, but it’s stained by Mycroft’s fingerprints, and he knows that he’ll feel Mycroft’s hands on him every time he wears the jumper from now on, and the thought makes him feel physically ill.

He puts on a fresh shirt and fresh pants and underwear and he bundles up the clothes on the floor and wraps them in the bedclothes and then he carries them downstairs to the bins and tosses them all in. It doesn’t occur to him until he’s on his way back up the stairs that he’s not wearing shoes. He sits down in his armchair and thinks for a while, his face impassive and numb, and then he can’t deal with the crawling of his skin anymore and so he stands up and shakes out his limbs.

He walks into the bathroom and turns the shower on as hot as it will go, then strips off the clothes he just put on and steps in. He stands for several seconds just letting the water run over him, then he starts to wash. He scrubs every inch of himself until the flesh is red, raw, stinging, and he still feels dirty and stained, and he remembers killing a man in Afghanistan and wonders why he feels so much more guilty about what he’s done tonight than he did about taking a life.

When he’s done in the shower, he gets out, puts his clothes back on, and slumps against the wall and slides down it to sit on the floor.

He hopes Sherlock is dead, because he doesn’t want to see the look in the man’s eyes when he sees Mycroft in the tilt of John’s neck and the angle of his eyelashes. He wonders if Sherlock’s eyes would show shock or disgust or betrayal or simply indifference. 

He wonders which would make him feel the worst. 

 

4.  
The same as the third, only when Mycroft leans in to kiss him, John turns his head and whispers, “Don’t.”

Mycroft takes a step backwards, putting more distance between them, and nods. “I do apologize. I simply wanted to... comfort you.”

John shoves his hands in his pockets and looks around at Sherlock’s belongings. “I don’t want to be comforted by anyone, especially you. After what you...” His voice gives out and he shakes his head hard and tries again. “I just want to be left alone.”

Mycroft narrows his eyes, watching John suspiciously, and the expression on his face as he thinks is so much like Sherlock that John wants to punch him to make it stop. Finally, Mycroft nods again. “Please don’t do anything rash. He would have wanted you to live.”

John lets out a bubble of horrified, sarcastic laughter and pinches the bridge of his nose. “No he wouldn’t,” he says, then drops his hand and shakes his head hard, looking out the window and not at Mycroft. “He was a selfish git and if there’s an afterlife, he wants me there to help him with his deductions about how God has a foot fetish and six medium-sized dogs and has been sleeping with Gabriel since Bethlehem.”

“And if there isn’t an afterlife?”

“Then what does it matter what he would have wanted? He’s gone.” John sighs and looks at the floor. “And it’s probably for the best. At least now he can get some sleep.” John doesn’t laugh at his own joke, and Mycroft doesn’t, either.

“Very well, John.” Mycroft taps the end of his umbrella on the floor and twirls it, watching the tip move in tiny controlled spirals on the floor. “Then live for me. For Mummy. For Mrs. Hudson. For those of us who don’t want to lose him completely.”

“I won’t live for you,” John says. “I won’t do it. How could I live for the man who killed my...” He stops. He can’t bring himself to say the word he wants to say, not out loud, not now that Sherlock is gone, but he won’t give Mycroft the satisfaction of hearing him use a word as generic and meaningless as “friend” or “flatmate” when they both know it’s gone far beyond either one.

“Then for the others,” Mycroft says, softly, still staring at the umbrella as if the circles it made held all the truth of the universe. And maybe it does, John thinks. If Sherlock was here, he could deduce the secrets of string theory from the twirl of Mycroft’s umbrella, John is certain of it. He wonders if the world is happier now, if it feels less threatened now that the one who could expose all its secrets is gone forever.

John stares at the umbrella for a long time, then nods. Mycroft sees the movement of his head and looks up. He stands there watching him for a few more seconds, then turns and leaves. 

After Mycroft is gone, John wanders through the flat and ends up in Sherlock’s bedroom. The bedsheets are twisted, pulled out from the foot of the bed at places and tucked firmly in at others. Of course the bed isn’t made--how could Sherlock justify wasting time on something pointless like keeping his sheets straight? 

John kicks off his shoes and climbs into the bed, pulling the blankets around his nose and breathing in the scent of Sherlock. He doesn’t cry. He lies there, with Sherlock’s things around him, staring at the periodic table on the wall and trying to make words with the letters. Sherlock would know all the possible combinations, probably in multiple languages. John wishes he had asked Sherlock for a list of them. He wishes a lot of things. 

It’s only much later that he stands up and goes to the bathroom. He looks at himself in the mirror and tries to remember which wrinkles he had before tonight and which ones are new. After a long time, he lowers himself down to sit on the floor and just tries to breathe. 

 

5.  
The same as the fourth, only John can’t bring himself to go into Sherlock’s room. He pauses at the door, fist raised to knock as if Sherlock would pop open the door and start complaining about crap telly or how long John had been gone before he noticed he wasn’t there and stopped talking to him, and the flash of expectation that Sherlock will be inside is almost enough to split open his insides. 

He goes into his own room and finds his gun, the one he’d kept hidden since he moved in. The one that had gone from being a comforting escape clause to a hidden shame and was suddenly back to being an escape clause again. He takes the gun and goes into the bathroom, sits down on the floor, and puts the gun in his mouth. 

He sits there for a long time, his lips wrapped around the gun, not moving, not crying, not trembling, just thinking about how he couldn’t imagine what would happen to him in a world without Sherlock. A conductor of light has no purpose in a universe filled only with darkness. 

It’s almost an hour later when Mrs. Hudson lets herself in and calls his name. John calmly takes the gun out of his mouth and stashes it in the clothes hamper.

Because Mycroft is right. With Sherlock gone, they all have to live for each other. 

 

6.  
The same as the fifth, only John pulls the trigger.

He has a sudden flash of memory: Sherlock, standing in a hot, dry baseball field in small-town America, the kind of place John has never been and never wants to go except that Sherlock is there, and he would follow Sherlock Holmes to the ends of the earth. He has another flash of memory, of himself in line at a bank, laughing at the man with the gun who’s robbing the place and then he remembers getting shot for laughing. But that’s not real. That didn’t happen. That was a story he read once. A story about a man who was shot in a bank robbery and who remembered nothing important about his life, only one scene of a baseball field from his childhood.

John thinks about himself in the bank robbery, remembers it vividly, the man’s sour breath washing over him and daring him to mouth off again, telling him he’ll kill him if he does. He remembers the woman in front of him in the queue and the stain on the hem of her coat and the exact shade of rose that the clouds on the bank ceiling are painted, but none of it is real. It’s all from the story. He’s wasting the last microseconds of his life thinking about a story he read once, a story he’d forgotten until now. 

And Sherlock is there, too, in the bank. John starts remembering more, and Sherlock’s always been there, in every scene of his whole life, the ones that happened and the ones that didn’t happen and the ones that may have happened but that he’s not completely sure about. And as his body starts to shut down, as the synapses in his brain start the process of stopping for good, the part of his mind that makes sense of everything blinks out and he remembers everything as if it’s true. 

He remembers that he never kissed Sherlock, even though he wanted to, every single day since the Study in Pink case. He remembers that he did kiss him, that they fell in love, that they spent every night curled up in each others’ arms. He remembers that he never knew what it felt like to have Sherlock beside him in bed and how that hurt, late at night when he was alone and the flat was cold. He remembers that they kissed and tried dating but it didn’t work out and they went back to just being friends. He remembers that they never crossed the line and remained best mates and nothing more, but that was enough. 

He remembers that he made love with Sherlock for the first time on Christmas Eve and it was life-changing, or maybe it was Mycroft on the night Sherlock died, or maybe it was both or maybe it was neither. He remembers that Sherlock was a fake and a liar and he remembers that Sherlock was the most honest man he’s ever known, painfully honest, and that he’d never do anything to hurt John except for all those times that John remembers when he hurt him.

He remembers growing old, watching Sherlock’s black hair turn silver strand-by-strand, and he remembers their dogs and their nieces and nephews and hundreds of varied jumpers, replaced frequently with whatever was on sale, alongside the same black coat and scarf, replaced only when necessary and always with an identical model. He remembers dying young, in a motoring accident near Chobham Common when he’d trusted Harry when she said she was sober, staring up at the stars as the life went out of his eyes, and Sherlock was there, beside him, of course, gripping his hand and saying, “Goodbye, John.”

He remembers hearing, “Goodbye, John.” It’s the only thing he remembers, there at the end, that he is sure is true.


End file.
